Azure Partner Community: The SAP movement in an Azure revolution

I am new to Microsoft, a career move that surprised a lot of my former colleagues. But my reason for joining Microsoft is excitement about where I see the company taking cloud computing. Cloud computing is a computing revolution. As the culture at Microsoft has changed over the past few years, it’s spurred new innovation and collaboration in the broad computer ecosystem. Last year, Microsoft and SAP announced a new collaboration – to certify SAP on Microsoft Azure – adding a new dimension to a long-term partnership.

Starting with the February 9 Azure Partner Community call, we’ll host a three-part series about SAP, SUSE, and Azure. During these calls, our most knowledgeable technical experts will lead discussions about current projects and how Microsoft is managing them. You’ll get deep technical information to help you build your practice, and we’ll share marketing and sales resources as well. In the rest of this blog post, I’ll explain how this is different from other cloud infrastructure workloads.

The main selling point of cloud computing, in my opinion, is not that you can virtualize stuff, but that you can manage your workloads on hosted hardware securely and efficiently via an API. Yes, this is an oversimplification of how cloud computing works, but hear me out. Some workloads are just unfriendly to virtualization based on the abstraction layers between the guest operating system and the physical hardware. The diminished performance is commensurate to the scale of the virtualized resource, which results in consumers paying more for less over a length of time. For enormous memory allocation, this can be a big deal for the application that’s chewing it up. A few years ago, Microsoft expert Juergen Thomas published a blog post demonstrating virtualization degradation with specific examples that included an SAP VM, Virtualization – Overcommitting memory and how to detect it within the VM.

Microsoft Azure also has improved allocation management on its infrastructure, and several vendors work to address this issue on private infrastructure.

Partner opportunity

There is significant demand in the market for expertise in SAP HANA deployments on Azure, presenting an opportunity for business growth at partners that leverage the investments they have made in their Azure practice.

The market opportunities that partners can work to address in this space include: